Other days

100 YEARS AGO

Aug. 14, 1920

■ The Pulaski County Democratic Central Committee adjourned yesterday afternoon until 11 o’clock this morning to hear the reports of the three subcommittees on the vote for state officers, the vote for county officers and the absent voters’ ballots. It is doubtful, however, if the subcommittee, which is canvassing the vote for the county officers, will be able to report by 11 o’clock.

50 YEARS AGO

Aug. 14, 1970

■ The Little Rock School Board’s decision to close Horace Mann High School instead of some other high school was based in part of the fact that it is difficult to persuade white parents to send their children to a formerly all-black school, Superintendent Floyd W. Parsons said Thursday. Parsons was the first witness called in federal District Court at a hearing being conducted by Judge J. Smith Henley on the School Board’s latest desegregation plan and alternate plans offered by the Negro plaintiffs.

25 YEARS AGO

Aug. 14, 1995

OLA — James Wallace Mahan, charged with killing Ola Police Chief Doyle Holstein, always locked his doors at night, his sister recalled last week. “He was always afraid someone was going to break in,” Crystal Mahan said. Relatives, however, feared James Mahan, 38, more than any outside intruder. “I would always lock my bedroom door every night when I went to bed, and I had scissors in there to cut the bedroom window screens in case I ever had to get out the window,” she said. The same held true for her father, who endured years of threats from his son, she said. Both Crystal Mahan and an exwife of James Mahan, who asked not to be named, said the family tried for years to obtain long-term in-patient care for James Mahan, but their pleas fell on deaf ears. James Mahan entered and exited the State Hospital in Little Rock at least six times during the last nine years, and those stays typically lasted only two or three weeks at a time, they said. “I guess nobody believed us about how sick he really was,” his ex-wife said. “They’d just drug him up and send him home.” Family members said it was not a surprise when, after years of violence and threats against them, James Mahan was accused of capital murder.

10 YEARS AGO

Aug. 14, 2010

■ A 21-year-old North Little Rock man was sentenced to five years in prison Thursday for shooting at a group of fleeing unarmed teenagers, killing one of them. The emotional hearing ended with his sister in contempt of court for throwing a fit when the judge pronounced his sentence. Darren Jamal Davis apologized for shooting 16-year-old Xavier Mantrel Williams in the back in May 2009, saying during Thursday’s sentencing hearing that he had only been trying to scare the boys away and break up a fight in front of Davis’ East Washington Avenue home.